Bells for the South Side

Recorded live at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the avant-garde saxophonist offers two hours of uncompromising experimentalism that’s been developed and sharpened to an atomically fine point.

“Music is 50% sound and 50% silence,” said Roscoe Mitchell in a 2005 interview. On his new double album Bells for the South Side, this may be an understatement. The record opens with a pause, a lingering moment of space which is then patiently ornamented by figures that seem to emerge from and dissolve back into the void. Mitchell stretches his improviser, composer, and conductor chops throughout, leading 12 musicians through two hours of heady dissonance, zig-zagging structures, and austere avant-jazz. But even at their most rip-roaring, you can feel the silence looming in the background. It’s always there.

Bells was recorded live at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the pioneering avant-garde collective of which Mitchell was an early member. This might suggest a tidy career retrospective, a cheery lifetime achievement award ceremony for one of the few left standing of a generation of iconoclasts. Yes, it’s true the museum was hosting an exhibition that celebrates and reinterprets Mitchell and his peers’ legacy. And yes, the ensembles on Bells pulled old percussion rigs used by Mitchell’s most famous group, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, out from cold storage. And yes, there’s a lovely performance of the AEOC’s “Odwalla,” from 1973. But Bells feels utterly contemporary, the work of a master, aged but energized, still pushing forward into the unknown.

If you’ve never heard of Mitchell, the AACM or the AEOC, well, Bells may not be the best place to start. It’s not for lack of quality, it’s just that Mitchell has been running circles around many of his contemporaries for half a century, building a unique musical language that’s as rewarding for devotees as it is impenetrable for noobs. His career began in the wake of the early free jazz trailblazers like Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, and John Coltrane, taking the raw possibilities of ’60s fire music in bold new directions. With the doors blown open and the rule book ripped up, there was the question of where to go next with all this freedom. Mitchell and co. answered it with a rich, exploratory body of work that combined jazz idioms, cutting edge experimentalism, global instrumentation, graphic scores and, in the case of AEOC, lots of face paint. Five decades later and Bells is a sink-or-swim kind of work, two hours of an uncompromising experimentalism that’s been developed, honed, and sharpened to an atomically fine point.

Difficult though it may be, it is also great. The pieces explore the various corners of Mitchell’s work, and the scope of his vision is impressive. Opener “Spatial Aspects of the Sound” could be mistaken for one of Morton Feldman’s earlier pieces in its soft, murmuring dissonance, while “Panoply” rides waves of rippling free jazz. “Prelude to the Card Game, Cards for Drums, and the Final Hand” has the type of somber bowed strings that Ligeti would admire, but they’re soon swapped out for an extended section of tumbling, swinging drums. Fluttering, miasmic drones (maybe a bass sax, or perhaps electronics, it’s hard to say) steal the show on the title track, answering an opening of peeling reeds with creepy, oscillating groans. The clean, linear horn lines on top are like arrows shot over a battlefield. Busy but unadorned, most of the players sit back as the percussion quietly explodes all around you, half chorus-of-church-bells, half gamelan-ensemble-falling-down-a-carpeted-stairwell.

Without dedicated players, this approach would fall flat on its face, but Mitchell’s devotees are fully up to the task. The performances are uniformly excellent—listen to the way the ensemble builds up the middle of “The Last Chord,” thwacking drums like exclamation marks in a wheezing, darting exhortation before exhaling into a tumbling groove that then drops into a perfectly timed sax solo. It’s the kind of liftoff-and-divebomb that countless improvisers dream of pulling off.

But Bells is only tangentially related to the average skronk session. Rather, it explores the raw qualities of sound, its material essence more than its symbolic, storytelling qualities. Though a mournful, expressive mood pervades, Mitchell seems fascinated to the point of obsession with the revelatory aspects of the unexpected. Over the years he’s opted for a difficult, occasionally ugly palette. His aim, however, hardly feels confrontational or antagonistic. Rather, these 11 pieces, like all of Mitchell’s work, are genuinely experimental, wringing affecting work from unexpected combinations, structures, harmonies. When the group wraps up with the smoky, catchy melodies of “Odwalla,” it’s not nearly as contrasting as you might think. Sure, it’s a gimme of a closer, but it serves to underscore Mitchell’s fundamentally expansive approach. No matter how far out he goes, it’s all part of the same musical whole.